It was a question, a single word, a single word with which she could silence her oppressors, those who would take advantage of her. What did they know of which she did not know more ? Her secret learning had bestowed her with self-importance, but more importantly, it had given her the most effective weapon against shame. “What do you know?” she would ask under her breath. Her arsenal of armaments were the things she knew the others did not: an alphabet of letters in two different languages, a collection of facts and stories called history, along with a sense of scale and perspective, in which the giants of misery in her old lives were reduced to mere shadows of their former terrifying glory. Scale by scale, chain by chain, link by link, word by word, Soon-Yee was beginning to stitch together an armor of knowledge, against which even the pointed stares of the day-wearied workers glanced off harmlessly. She swore she would never again feel ashamed, would never again let anyone make her feel ashamed: not the Nipponese demon, not the pinch-fingered laborers, not even Grandmother with her punishing switch of a tongue and her sharp criticisms as stinging as a lash.

To be ignorant was to be vulnerable, to be vulnerable was to be defenseless against those who would abuse her innocence, and to be defenseless was to be ashamed. When Soon-Yee realized it was ignorance which had killed her previous selves, she swore she would walk through the world with her eyes open.

S jae jones